President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with North Korean defectors where he talked with reporters about allowing the release of a secret memo on the FBI's role in the Russia inquiry, in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, Feb. 2, 2018, in Washington.Evan Vucci / AP

At the nuclear core of a four-page memo released Friday on the ongoing Trump-Russia collusion controversy these incendiary and damning revelations:

That the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) misled, misdirected and effectively weaponized information to convince judges on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to gain permission in 2016 to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign for what now appears to be nakedly partisan political purposes.

That the Russia collusion conspiracy theory the FBI peddled to receive extraordinary permission to spy on former Trump adviser Carter Page would never have been permitted had the agency told FISA the whole truth.

That the FBI bamboozled FISA into permitting an investigation by legitimizing a sketchy “dossier” cooked up by former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, who told the FBI he was “desperate” to ensure Trump didn’t get elected and lied to them about leaking details of his dossier to the media.

That the FBI failed to tell FISA judges that Steele, a long-time FBI source, was “paid over $160,000 by the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and Clinton campaign” to create the dossier and dig up “derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.”

That the FBI failed to tell the court it terminated Steele for lying to them about the media leaks, or that Steele met, before and after his termination, with then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior official with the Department of Justice, and blatantly revealed his bias against Trump to Ohr.

The FBI and DOJ also “inexplicably concealed” from the judges during an initial FISA application and three subsequent renewals that Ohr’s wife was employed by a research firm hired by the Democrats “to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump.

For Canadians, the complex and byzantine web of allegations, charges and counter-charges surrounding the Russia-collusion storyline make for fine political soap opera, though we’re currently awash with that here as well.

However, the memo declassified by Trump Friday should be deeply troubling to all of America’s friends because it suggests law enforcement and intelligence agencies there gained extraordinary permission to spy on American citizens by misleadingly suggesting they were up to no good on behalf of foreign powers.

And in fact it appears that the spies themselves who were up to no good.

“Our findings… raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people,” said the memo prepared by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and its chairman Devin Nunes.

Trump himself reacted with his usual vigor on Twitter.

The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans – something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!

“The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans – something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!” Trump tweeted.

Trump is not wrong, though the FBI, Democrats, political left and Trump-hating U.S. mainstream media twisted themselves into knots all day trying to spin and justify the stink surrounding the FBI’s methods.

Nunes, in response to the agency’s bleating objections over the release of the memo had this to say:

“Having stonewalled Congress’ demands for information for nearly a year, it’s no surprise to see the FBI and DOJ issue spurious objections to allowing the American people to see information related to surveillance abuses at these agencies,” he said in a statement.

“It’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign,” Nunes said. “Once the truth gets out, we can begin taking steps to ensure our intelligence agencies and courts are never misused like this again.”

“You had Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party try to hide the fact that they gave money to GPS Fusion to create a Dossier which was used by their allies in the Obama Administration to convince a Court misleadingly, by all accounts, to spy on the Trump Team.” Tom Fitton, JW

It’s looking less and less like the Russians had much of anything to do with Trump’s election, and increasingly that desperate Democrats aided and abetted by the very agencies charged with protecting America’s interests were in fact acting against it.

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